performance issues in simple arithmetic code

[Denys Rtveliashvili]

Hi David,
>
>> -------------------
>> Question: can't it use cheap multiplication and shift instead of expensive
>> division here? I know that such optimisation is implemented at least to some
>> extent for C--. I suppose it also won't do anything smart for expressions
>> like a*4 or a/4 for the same reason.
> There isn't really any optimisation done on Cmm and the native code
> generator doesn't do much optimisation itself, hence you get the more
> direct forward translation. This kind of code is where the LLVM
> backend does well in comparison. I haven't tried benchmarking the
> performance of -fasm vs -fllvm for this code but if you eyeball the
> assembly code produced by -fllvm then you'll see it uses shifts and
> other magic.
>
> Cheers,
> David
Well.. I found some places in C-- compiler which are supposed to convert 
division and multiplication by 2^n into shifts. And I believe these work 
sometimes.
However in this case I am a bit puzzled because even if I change the 
constants in my example to 2^n like 1024 the code is not optimised.

By the way, is there any kind of documentation on how to hack C-- compiler?
In particular, I am interested in:
* how to run its optimiser against some C-- code and see what does it do
* knowing more about its internals

With kind regards,
Denys Rtveliashvili